


The shape of things inferred by their absence

by deepandlovelydark



Series: Domestic Adventures [24]
Category: MacGyver (TV 1985)
Genre: Alcohol, Bad Jokes, Childhood Trauma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Humor, Mac is a sweetheart, Platonic Cuddling, and so is Becky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-20 10:13:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13715514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: "No treasure maps or foreign adventures this time, Mac. Just going back to Wisconsin, taking care of business.""Jack, c'mon. What else are friends for?"





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I hafta write this story, to find out how "Hey didde diddle" over in "Second Chances" would finish up. Hence the title. 
> 
> Subject to my co-author's opinion of the timeline, this would be set in 1990, in the summer after Becky's high school graduation.

The night is dark and stormy; the fire hot; and Becky is tucked up on a sofa with two of her favourite people in the whole world, feeling more than usually safe and contented with life.

Her uncle's comatose, after a hectic day of troubleshooting. Today was retrieving a stolen drug shipment: AIDS pills that haven't had FDA approval yet and are technically illegal- except when distributed through an organisation with enough lawyers to jump through all the legal hoops, like a Phoenix subsidiary. He's gently snoozing against the sofa arm. Becky wraps another quilt about him, and he smiles in his sleep. 

"He looks happy enough," Jack comments, readjusting his own blankets. "Good thing you have him around, you know. I hope you appreciate that."

"Me, Jack? Do you really think you have to tell me that?"

"Well, okay," he admits, after a long pause. "But still...I don't know, I'm just all wet tonight. Ruth Forrester sent me a letter today, says they're doing well in Florida."

She knows of Ruth, if not much about her; the person who'd taken in young Jack, back in Mission City. "I guess she must have been pretty nice."

"Oh, I thought the world of her! No matter what kind of craziness I tried out, she just took it like a trooper- not that I ever did act up that much, when she was around. She had a funny way like that. Too bad for Mac he doesn't have the knack, or he'd have a much quieter life."

"But less entertaining...so she was nicer than your life before, I take it."

Jack mock-shudders (she thinks, to hide a real one). "I'll say. My uncle Nelson, well....let's put it this way, it wasn't the same cosy relationship as the one you have with your uncle. I used to get sent to bed without supper for any excuse at all."

"Don't go scaring my niece like that," MacGyver says sleepily. He scoops up Becky, holds her next his heart. "I thought we'd agreed not to talk about Wisconsin."

"When did I agree to that? I'm just telling her to appreciate what she's got, because she sure wasn't guaranteed that."

"She is for as long as I'm alive and kicking."

Sweet of her uncle to say, but tonight it looks like Jack needs reassurance more than she does. The pilot's been unusually tentative, for somebody who's brazenly invited himself over for pizza and tv. Nervous even, if the idea of Jack Dalton being nervous about anything short of summary execution wasn't almost laughable. "Jack, what's really wrong?"

He takes several quick, deep breaths, as though psyching himself up. "Funny thing, that when he went to prison it had nothing to do with me at all. I say prison- hospital, he was judged criminally insane. I didn't think so. Anyway, they shut down the hospital last month, lack of funds, and he was supposed to be transferred elsewhere, but there was a paperwork mixup or something and now he's out on the street. Ruth heard about it and thought I ought to know..." 

MacGyver's properly awake now. "I can get Pete to look into this. Get some Phoenix funding pumped into the place, get it reopened."

"I'm sure you can, but that's not really the point just now."

"You're scared for your uncle?" Becky asks sympathetically. 

He stares at her with tense unhappiness. "I'm sure this'll come to a surprise to anybody as mellow as you, but I am not one bit scared for him. I'm scared of him. Two hours ago I'm a hotshot pilot, with my own airplane and a police record I point and laugh at, then I get around to reading my mail and- and suddenly I'm just a lost kid again, who doesn't know what's going to happen next."

"All right, knock it off," MacGyver presses. "Jack, okay, I'll come with you and we'll track down the guy- but why couldn't you just have asked me, instead of trying to give my niece nightmares?"

"Because this is one time I really need you not to say no," Jack says, his voice low and unsteady. "And I didn't have any adventurous sounding stuff to bribe you into it this time, like I usually would. Besides. You know how hard it is to get you alone without your niece, these days? Even Pete says he finds it a chore."

"Contrary to popular rumour, my niece and I aren't actually joined at the hip. Look, you might have noticed by now that I'm incapable of turning you down..especially for something important like this. Course I'll come."

"Good thing too," Jack says solemnly. "Otherwise, what with the height difference you'd have an awful time getting around the place. I mean, imagine trying to walk, with Becky's little legs dangling a foot off the ground- wouldn't you overtopple all the time?" 

Becky sputters. "Jack, that's just- ew!" 

But she can't help laughing along; typical Jack, to jump on the dumbest possible joke to cheer himself up. 

MacGyver tilts his head back, gazes up at the ceiling. "Prosthetics would be boring- maybe stilts, though? Little stilts with roller skates at the end, maybe some flanged stabilisers. With a safety harness- hey. I bet this would be a lot more interesting for the Phoenix summer picnic than that musty old sack race again." 

"Birds of a feather, huh Unc? You two are both nuts."

"You sound just like your mother," MacGyver agrees, before catching himself. "Sorry. Sorry, Becky, I didn't think-"

"It's okay."

"Right. Sorry." 

"Anyway. She did used to say it."

Jack gets a laugh out of it, anyway. He never was averse to a good joke, even if it was on him.

****************

"Becky, I am not being overprotective. You don't do well in planes, you know that. Jack certainly knows that."

"Which is why he bought me the airsickness pills. Unc, I'll be fine. How else would we get from Los Angeles to Wisconsin, anyway?"

"What I'm saying is, you don't have to be here for this," MacGyver insists. "This is Jack's problem, and I'll help him through it like always. You don't need to see it."

"I want to come anyway," Becky insists, a little frantic now; Jack's nearly done refueling the plane. "Because he's your friend, and because he's mine too. Because I know that whatever happened to him could have happened to me-"

"No!"

"-if I hadn't been lucky enough to have the best uncle in the whole world," she finishes. "Gosh, Unc, I wonder if mom wouldn't say you're guilty of a little transference. Getting real worked up about me being involved in any of this, because it makes you uncomfortable me equating my situation with Jack's. Even though you're my good uncle to his bad one."

"Wasn't one generation of the family who could mind-read me at will bad enough?" MacGyver says to nobody in particular. "Did it have to be two?"

"You two coming aboard this rust bucket or not?" Jack shouts. "I wanna get her into the air already!"

"Coming," Becky says, pushing her uncle forward. "You are coming, right?"

"I ought to buy a St Christopher's medal, or a string of prayer beads or a lucky horseshoe or something, just to bring along whenever Jack’s flying," he mutters as they get in. 

"To make yourself feel better?"

"So I can spend a crucial ten minutes telling myself it won't even do anything, while Jack's getting on with putting us into the air. Some kind of distraction. Any kind of distraction."

Becky smiles, as they buckle up. "Why don't you tell me a story? The one about camel-smuggling, maybe?"

"Uh- Becky, which one?"

"Oh. Both of 'em, why don't you?"

By the time he's done spinning that out, LA is far behind them. 

*****************

Their arrival in Wisconsin is at far too late an hour to do anything productive, so they find rooms at a convenient hotel and head down to the restaurant. Jack immediately vamooshes over to the bar.

"So much for being moral support," MacGyver says, shaking his head at the flirtations. After a couple of false starts, Jack's found himself a redhead even shorter than he is, and the drinks and witticisms are both flowing freely. 

"I get the feeling he doesn't want to be alone tonight," Becky ventures. "Maybe I shouldn't have come along after all."

"Don't worry about it on that score. If he wanted me to come sleep in his room, he only needed to ask- it wouldn't be any different than guarding somebody on a Phoenix mission."

There's a lot that Becky's tempted to say to her uncle at this point, about just how oblivious he can be and mixed signals and the obvious thing he has going on with Nikki Carpenter, that everybody at Phoenix except the two of them has seen coming for absolute yonks (maybe she and Penny ought to get their heads together, kick that relationship up a notch already.) All of which typically amuses Jack as much as anyone ("Becky, that's just typical Mac- do you know how long it took him to ask out Ellen Stuart in high school?")...but just right now, stuck in the past and pondering how things could have turned out differently, maybe Jack’s feeling more vulnerable than usual. 

"Getting turned down by a stranger would hurt less."

MacGyver gives her a sharp look. She shrugs and leaves it at that. 

"I think I've changed my mind," he says to the waiter, once they have their salads. "That wine you were suggesting, to go with my trout- what was it, red? White? Give us half a bottle, something Californian."

"Half a bottle of something Californian," the waiter repeats; and allows a deep, weary disgust to show before getting back into character. 

"I don't do this much, but my niece suggested it."

"No, I didn't."

"Ways and ways of suggesting," MacGyver says, and gets through all of three-quarters of a glass before.abandoning the attempt. Jack's long since tripped back upstairs, singing Cher with his lady of the night. 

Becky keeps her mouth shut and her ears open. She's having quite an informative evening. 

***************

Next day doesn't start well; hungover and still mildly inebriated Jack doesn't respond well to MacGyver's early-morning wakeup call, and absolutely refuses to go anywhere before he's had the greasiest, unhealthiest breakfast the hotel restaurant can serve up. 

"Who puts onions into a bacon, sausage and cheese omelette? What about that combination says 'yes, I'm the kind of person who wants health food in my breakfast'?"

"You're lucky they didn't throw in the kitchen sink," MacGyver says, through a mouthful of banana. "You ordered just about everything else."

"Helps soak up the alcohol- why are we out at this early an hour? Look at your poor niece," Jack says, gesturing at Becky. "She’s practically sleep-walking."

"Two votes against one," Becky mumbles, leaning against her uncle for support as they walk down the street. "Jack, if he wakes us up this early tomorrow, I vote we throw pillows at him and go back to sleep."

"I'll drink to that."

"Can I help it, if I like clean living?"

"Sure you can, if you put your mind to it," Becky says. "What's clean living got to do with it? I'm not the one who was drinking all that wine last night."

"Wine? I was on whisky sours."

"No, 'im," Becky waves, vaguely. 

"The guy over there walking his dog?"

"No no no, him," she repeats, whacking her uncle indicatively (MacGyver has to stop for a moment, quite winded- he hadn't exactly been expected to get clobbered right that second, and Becky can hit pretty hard when she's not awake enough to pull her punches). "All this wine. Lots of wine."

"Aw. Mac, that was sweet of you. Totally unnecessary, but sweet."

"Do I just," MacGyver says, in utter exasperation, "put you two back to bed and get on with this investigation myself?"

"That," Jack says hopefully, "is the best idea you've had all morning."

***************

They're both a lot more civilised when he returns after lunch, cheerful niece and wry pilot instead of a couple of moaning zombies. It's a small thing, hardly even worth mentioning, but times like these he misses Nikki Carpenter's get-up-and-go attitude towards life. She's a morning person, just like him. 

"Mostly negatives, I'm afraid," he tells Jack. "Nobody knows where he is, nobody's looking for him, nobody even seems to know what's happened to his case worker, if he has one at all. We'll have to do our own investigations."

"Figures," Jack mutters. "Did you find out who's living at the old house?'

"Taken by the city in lieu of unpaid taxes a few years back, but nobody's wanted to buy the place. Is that where we start?"

"He was an orderly man," Jack says. "Either there, or...back in Mission City."

"Oooh!" Becky says, eagerly. They haven't been in Mission City since Grandpa Harry's death, but it's a cute little town. Very picturesque. "I wouldn't mind a trip over there again. See if anything's changed since we were last there."

"And it's only a short hop by plane. Up and down again, easy," Jack says. "I was going to need a recuperative flight soon anyway- it’s the best reason I’ve ever heard of for staying sober."

MacGyver contents himself with a sigh. Maybe they'll have better luck than that. 

************

A wire fence blocks entry to the property; but of course, with Unc around that takes all of three minutes to get through. He spends longer bending the fence hoops straight again, so it isn't so obvious the wires have been cut. 

"It's not like we're really trespassing," he says, in response to Jack's eyebrow-raise. "After a fashion, it's still your uncle's property."

"He always made me feel like I was trespassing," Jack mutters, looking distinctly unsure of himself again. More so after they go inside, to find a plain, miniscule kitchen with a minimum of furniture and a quantity of dust. 

"Looks like somebody must have beat us to the place," Becky says. "There's hardly anything in here."

"No, that was just how he liked to live. My showing up doubled the furniture in here- suddenly he had to have two chairs and plates and spoons, instead of one of each. And- huh, I remember this," Jack says, holding up a chain attached to the old-fashioned ice box. "He made a point of installing a padlock, just because- of course I figured out how to pick it, but that didn't help any. He was so tight, he'd have noticed food going missing."

Becky shivers, and clings close to her uncle. The dust-choked curtains are still performing their duty; even with the door open, it's close and dark in here. MacGyver flicks on a flashlight. 

"Well, this looks like a dead end," he says. "Still...might as well make a thorough job of the thing."

"There's something else, of course," Jack says with a small smile. "He said he kept his life savings in a Bible. I never figured it amounted to much, or not enough to be worth the trouble of coming back to find."

"The trouble? Treasure seeker Jack, and you didn't think it was worth the trouble?"

"C'mon."

Behind the kitchen is a grotesque little parlour, stiff and ugly. Stuffed to the brim with bookcases, and shelves, and legal pads and pens and red wax pencils. The dust gives everything the impression of riotous disorder, but allowing for that, Becky realises, it's all meticulously tidy. The product of a very organised mind. 

And every single shelf is packed full with copies of the Bible. King James edition for preference, though she notices a scattering of others. 

"You can see the problem," Jack remarks. "The big passion of his life, he used to pick them up whenever he saw one in a pawnshop or a bookstore or anywhere. And it isn't as though I could just peek at them on the sly, because he spent all his time in here and he knew exactly if I so much as touched one."

"Hundreds of volumes," Becky breathes. "Thousands, maybe."

"Two thousand, four hundred and sixty-one," Jack says; and looks thoroughly annoyed with himself. "So there's a special kind of torment for you. If you're a hungry little kid wanting to make a run for it, and knowing your getaway money is all just sitting right there in the next room, teasing the life out of you-"

"Jack," MacGyver says softly, placing his hands on the shorter man's shoulders. "It's okay. It's all right. I'm here this time."

Jack breathes out. Nods and readjusts his cap, at a jaunty angle. 

"Well, I sure hope you are. Otherwise I'm having one hell of a hallucination- Becky, do you think I'm hallucinating your uncle?"

"If you are, you must have put the same drug in my orange juice at breakfast, because I think I'm hallucinating him too," Becky says. Very gravely, before they both burst into laughter. 

It's not the guffaws that MacGyver finds himself minding. It's the way they're looking at each other, in shared humour, and the sudden realisation that right now, they understand each other in a way he doesn't and never will. He's used to taking a certain grim comfort in the car crash that had taken his father and grandmother away, for helping him understand what his niece had gone through a generation later. 

But he'd had his mother, his older sister, never been so completely abandoned to the world as these two; and he finds himself wanting to compare notes with Ruth Forrester. Ask if she ever had this feeling of frustration at just plain not understanding their charge, for all the sympathy in the world. 

(Still, he had brought Jack into Becky's life; and maybe that's helped her more than he'd realised. To think he'd wondered whether his best friend might be a bad influence.)

"Well, this would be worth it even if we don't find Nelson," Becky says, wiping her eyes. "Why don't we have a look around, see if we can find this trove? I mean, Unc's here. Think you can whip up something clever?"

"Might do..." He turns round a few times, walks up and down the aisles. Grins, and pulls a huge concordance off a top shelf. 

"First try?" Jack says in amazement, as MacGyver turns the pages to reveal a thick envelope. 

"Aw, it was just some simple psychology. Anybody who likes Bibles as much as this wouldn't want to bust up the spine, or carve out the pages or anything. Figured you had to be remembering it wrong, it'd be one of the other books- and why would he put that heavy book way up there, if he wasn’t trying to keep it away from you?" He hands the envelope over to Jack. "Care to do the honours?"

"Glad to!"

Jack rips it open, to a shower of colourfully printed Bible verses, the kind of literature passed out at train stations for the edification of travellers. Also a note.

_For **wisdom** is better than **rubies** ; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it._

On the flipside is a small prim message, recommending the use of bank deposit-boxes. 

"Unbelievable," Jack mutters. "No, I lied. It's totally believable."

"I think," Becky mutters, "I'm starting to see why you didn't like this guy..."


	2. Chapter 2

“So what did Davies do, anyway?” Becky asks. “I mean, if it isn’t rude to ask.”

Just some distraction, while they drive the rental up to Nelson's former bank. It’s some kind of starting point, anyway, since they don’t have any other leads. 

“Ah,” Jack says, glancing at her uncle. Surprisingly, it’s not the pilot who’s wincing. 

“He tried to kill me,” MacGyver says, tersely. “Right out a third-story window- I already had my fear of heights, but that sure didn’t help any.”

“Yeesh. Sorry I asked, Unc- um, but should you really be the one looking for him?”

“Oh, it’s all right. A quarter of a century since that happened, I bet he doesn’t even remember me- it wasn’t exactly personal, Becky. I just happened to be around when he lost it.”

“Your uncle’s charitable to a fault,” Jack observes. “I agreed with Ellen, the state shoulda thrown the book at him. But it’s hard to make the kind of thing stand up when the victim won’t press charges…and Mission City always did hate the idea of its citizens being charged with felonies. They figured they were above that kind of thing. So he got off lightly.”

“Habit of a lifetime,” MacGyver says. “And after Jesse, I couldn’t face condemning anybody else- I just couldn’t. Mind if we talk about something else in public?” he asks, as they swing into the parking lot. 

“Sure thing, Mac.”

“Right.”

She’d known that her uncle had had quite the childhood in Mission City, but he’d never mentioned anything like this before. Her mother sure hadn’t; Allison had always confined her tales of the place to soft, comforting stories about cafe hilarities and mild childhood hijinx. Well, she’s older now. 

Curious, too. “But you’ll finish telling me later, right?”

“That’s pretty much it,” MacGyver says, a trifle put out now. Jack winks at her, though. 

Might be an interesting conversation, later. 

************

When they reach the bank, it’s a hoot watching the two guys swing into action. Jack first, trotting out a request for access to his uncle’s records in his artful, charming, and way over-the-top fashion.

That doesn’t work out so well (the bank clerk just sort of tuts at him), which is when her uncle intervenes. Softly apologising for his friend’s anxiety, mentioning Phoenix in an off-hand way, smiling the way he does…

“It’s like you choreographed that or something,” Becky says, as the clerk vanishes into the back. 

“Comedy improv is great practice for cons,” Jack says cheerfully. “Your unc and I really could have made something of that, if he’d had the patience to stick with it.”

“This is your day for reminding me of terrible things, isn’t it?” MacGyver snorts. “Almost made getting drafted worth it.”

“I said he shoulda dodged it and come up to Canada, like I did.” 

“I said he should have tried getting into the Air Force.”

“Weird how the lifetime pacifist ended up in the service,” Jack notes. “Whereas if I’d ended up in as many insane situations as Mac usually does, I’d probably have killed somebody in self-defense by now. Good thing I have a nice quiet life.”

“Oh? So why is all heck always breaking loose whenever you call for help, huh?” 

“Because that’s exactly when I need to call you! Wouldn’t want to outstay my welcome,” Jack says. “I mean, I probably pop up a little too often as is.”

“I don’t think so,” Becky puts in. “You know what Unc’s like. He’s got this awful way of trying to convince himself he doesn’t need anybody else’s help- and that’s with me in the house, I hate to think how lonely he’d be without friends who like him enough to insist on sticking around.”

“Hmm. I like that way of putting it.”

“Guys-“ MacGyver starts. 

He’s interrupted by the clerk coming back. 

“Here we are, sir.” To MacGyver, quite pointedly. “Current address of record has him in Mission City, Minnesota. I’ve written down the address for you.”

“Hurrah! Another plane flight!”

“There are other, rather easier ways of getting there,” the clerk says, with a sniff. 

“Are there? I don't believe you.”

“Plus it’s faster,” Becky adds, when MacGyver opens his mouth. “And fun!”

“Friends like yours, who needs enemies?” the clerk ventures. 

“I do!”

This time, the sniff’s clearly directed at all three of them. 


	3. Chapter 3

“What town is this?” Nelson asks.

“Mission City,” the shop owner says, without even looking at him. People seem to have become less polite since he was last in the world; or perhaps gun sellers don’t see the need. No matter. This is the right one, finally.

He’s very tired, shoes and stockings and feet worn from weeks of patient walking. There’s only one thing he desires now, and that only out of a sense of weary obligation. Ellen MacGyver deserves his apologies.

No doubt he’ll find her. She’ll stay in this town until her dying day.

The streets are unfamiliar, cluttered and louder than he remembers (or is that just the years of blessed, soothing silence?) He circles back on his tracks more than once, wanders up alleys and enclosures. Taking the Parker mansion as a guide: that hill’s familiar contours seem stamped upon his memory.

Would he remember his Wisconsin home any better? Or Texas? No.

He finds the place at last, but it takes him awhile to recognise- in fact, he walks past at first and has to double back. The Chrysanthemum Cafe is deserted, with dusty windows shrouding the darkness inside. Nobody’s been here for a long time.

Then a tinge of sunset light colours the cafe’s window, bright enough to make it seem inhabited, inviting. Surely- it would be so easy, to take the few steps-

 _You could step back_ , a voice whispers to him. _Step back, find out what happened to her. Or further back still- make amends with the children, twine flowers in her hair. Or onwards, yet…take your first love by the hand, a woman made warm and willing and fertile, as she always should have been…_

“I will not,” Nelson Davies says, into the night’s silence. “For that would be a sin. Man proposes, but God disposes…”

No quiet institution would be sufficient punishment, for what he’d done. Nothing he could do in this life would be; but he hasn’t escaped unscathed.

“You see, it doesn’t matter.” He sits down on the sidewalk, careless of the grit against his clothing (to think how he would have cared once, about the fleeting whiteness of a suit). Cradling his head against the shop window, shivering a little in the lazy northern wind. “Why would I seek out more life- how could I, when I’ve so mangled this one?”

“But my mother brought me to see you,” Angus says.

The ghost of a boy, dead these twenty years and more. Sun-browned flesh, warmer than his own.

“She thought it would help- I thought it would too, I came willingly. I’m here, you know. You didn’t kill me.”

“Between the intention and the act,” Nelson tells him, coughing. Odd phrase, to stick in his memory after so long. “Do you know how many times I did? So many. And I meant to do it.”

“I forgive you.”

“Easy words, from a ghost.”

“He’s not okay, is he?”

This from a girl, young and modern and dressed in tawdry fashions. And yet her place is here, too; he nods acceptance, seeing the half-conscious righteousness alight in her eyes. Avenging angel, for the child he’d hurt.

“Children,” she says, in a low and halting voice. As though the words are being dragged out of her, as though she burns with the same blessed, unholy knowledge he possesses. “Two children, remember? What about Jack?”

“There was always something wrong with him,” Nelson says, best he can. His coughing’s growing worse. “Something- broken. I had years to think on it, later. Unto the fourth generation…the sins of the mother. I should have known the first night.”

“Not the first night,” Angus tells him, all perceptive innocence. “The third night. When he cried fasting, and you put your hand to him- you laid your own snare then, dug the pit of your own destruction. His safety in your downfall.”

“I suppose…I suppose you’re right.”

In the dimming twilight, he can see only calm, expressionless reserve on the ghost’s face, as though nothing at all has been said; and perhaps it hadn’t.

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

“Not half as sorry as I am. I wonder- I wonder whether you wouldn’t have been good for her. She died so much younger than she should have…”

Not a ghost, then. Temptation, perhaps his last.

_Come, come. Wipe the slate clean. Claim Ellen for your own._

“Thy will be done, not mine,” Nelson says; and spares a moment to wonder if he’s guilty of self-righteous pride. The answer is yes, as ever. Hellbound he was and is, and always shall be.

His eyes are closing, but he catches sight of one last flicker in his angel’s eyes. Approval, and something more.

_Redemption, at the last?_

_Oh, how Charlotte would have laughed…_

*************

Halfway across town, Jack looks up from the carousal with his Uncle Charlie.

(“Got a hunch I should come up here, you know?” “A hunch called Ruth, huh?” “Well, perhaps…”)

“Mac musta found him. I get the feeling somebody’s walking over my grave.”

“Oh, forget the guy,” Charlie says, flushed and happy. “My round to treat- more Scotch?”

“Don’t mind if I do!”

They toast each other’s health, and the barkeep’s and the rest of the bar, and the state of Minnesota just for the hell of it, and keep drinking and singing long, loud cowboy ballads; and don’t even spare a thought for Nelson Davies that whole evening. Nor the next morning, which is mostly spent in sleepy hungover recollection, in a grimy motel room. Catching up on all their riotous hilarity. 

Not until the next afternoon, then, when a tired Angus MacGyver tracks them down to say that Nelson Davies is dead.

“Walked all the way to my mother’s old cafe, would you believe it? I can’t imagine how he hadn’t died of exposure on the way- but I guess he was just that fixed on doing it, that happens sometimes. Heart gave out as soon as he’d made it.“

“Good riddance,” Charlie says, swigging from his flask.

Jack wouldn’t ever say the same. At least, not with Mac looking sternly down at him.

Doesn’t stop him thinking it, though.


	4. Chapter 4

_Four days later._

This isn’t how Nelson would have wanted it, Jack is sure of that. 

Ruth’s flown up from Florida, to reopen her summer house and give everyone a cheery place to stay. The place he still thinks of as home, rather more than a succession of anonymous LA apartments or even a cosy plane cockpit: it’s somewhere he ought to be at peace. Feel warm and protected, even in the face of encroaching mortality. 

And to do ‘em all justice, his family’s trying their hardest to support him. His foster mother’s fussing away in best mother-hen style, knitting at blanket throws in between cooking more food than anybody can even think of eating. Uncle Charlie never lets the conversation stop, tossing off one entertaining n’er-do-well tale after another with the ease of forty years’ practice. Mac’s always around to provide a sympathetic ear, and Becky- well. As she’s said herself, her specialities are fetching and carrying and cuddling, and she’s been doing a lot of all three. 

Only, just at present he isn’t in the mood for any of them. Any of this. 

“Still looking a little down at mouth, sonny?” Charlie asks, as he walks into the kitchen. “I thought you’d be all over that, now the funeral’s done.”

“Yeah? Some people would say that’s when the serious grieving starts.” He’s never heard anybody say that, actually, but for pre-coffee repartee it’ll pass. 

Charlie shakes his head and goes back to necking Ruth (who giggles, as she doles out meat and eggs Benedict). Not exactly broken up in despair, his uncle. Ruth is even less so. She and Nelson had always cordially despised each other, and a little thing like his death isn’t going to change her mind on that. 

“I know what you need,” MacGyver says. “A flight, that’ll do you good. I’ll even let you teach me loop-de-loops this time if you want.”

“Don’t feel like it.”

“No, what he wants is a nice, juicy diddle to take his mind off things,” Charlie cajoles. “I have a proposition. This cellmate of mine in Leavenworth told me about this heist he did, there’s five million dollars in the offing.“

“Not interested.”

“You two are ridiculous, trying to make serious conversation before breakfast,” Ruth scolds. “Get some food into you, Jack, I made the bacon with a sugared maple-cinnamon glaze. Won’t that be nice?”

She presses his favourite blue willow plate into his hands. Jack takes it automatically, but finds himself putting it down. “I’m not hungry, either.”

Everyone stares at him, even modest Becky. Checking for his eye twitch, probably. 

Well, they’re not gonna find one. “Doesn’t it strike any of you, just how inappropriate this all is?”

“No,” Charlie answers. “Not a bit of it. We even sprang for a funeral service, since you insisted- wasn’t that enough for the codger?”

After all these years they’d still been legally married, leaving Charlie as official next of kin. Left up to him, it’d have been the quickest possible cremation, no muss nor fuss. “And some ceremony that was. Not a single person even cried.” 

Nobody there, except the four of them and a thoroughly perfunctory minister. _Dammit, but if there was anything that Nelson hated, it was indifference._

“I don’t get it,” Mac says. Brash confusion, anyway. “You hated him, you always said so- I mean, I didn’t blame you, considering the abuse. So what’s going on?”

“It shoulda been me there that night, you know. Not you. I wanted to see him, tell him just how- how.” His voice is cracking now, childishly. “I wanted to let him know how I’ve made it. A plane, and secret agent mission stuff. Living in Los Angeles, all those crazy dreams he’d never have taken seriously. I wanted to shove that in his face hard.”

“Honey,” Ruth says, in her soft modest way. “That’s not very nice.”

“It wasn’t gonna be! What makes you all think I am, anyway?”

Charlie gives him a sideways look. Fair enough: he hadn’t really been the target for that one.

“Because, basically, you are,” MacGyver says. Earnest as ever. “Trust me, Jack. If you’d been there, you wouldn’t have felt you needed to do anything like that. He was very old, very tired…I mean, you’re not that sadistic.”

“Yeah. Well, it didn’t happen, and I wish it had, because I’ve been meaning to get around to that for years, but- but here we are now, and it’s been non-stop on the cuddle train all week, all this sugar and treats and being loved to death, and how is this right? I mean, can’t any of you guys even try and make an effort? Wear black or something?“

“I didn’t bring any,” Becky says, looking ruefully down at her colourful purple sweater. 

“…I think you’re lost me,” Mac says. “You wish you’d been crueler to him when he was alive, but now he’s died you want everyone to be miserable about him?”

Jack just about starts howling at that point. 

Doesn’t: instead, tucks his hands in his pockets. There’s a tiny prayer book in there, with crimson lettering and gold-edged pages. The kind of thing he can probably flog off to hippie mystics for beer money when he gets back to Los Angeles, which is why he’d swiped it in the first place. 

Only he’s been reading it, instead. “You know what? I’m going for a walk. See you guys later.”

Ruth always forbade him to slam the door, so he doesn’t. 

He does make a point of locking it behind him, though. 

*************

Mission City’s grown some since he was last here (when was that? High school reunion or something?) Sprawls more, but in a stretched, thin sort of way, as though the population’s stayed constant but have been forced apart from each other. 

About a mile in, it occurs to him that he’s doing exactly what Nelson had- aimlessly wandering the town, seeking a solace that isn’t here- and to clamp down a sudden sense of panic he works up a destination. That park by the salt marshes, the unsavoury one littered with broken bottles and goose dung. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s somewhere he always liked to be as a kid. 

Trouble is, when he gets there he has no idea what to do next. 

“Sure, it’s just the way I remember it,” Jack says, curling up on one of the less vandalised benches. “Great. Trip down nostalgia lane accomplished. Now what?”

There’s the sound of a car pulling up in the distance; and he isn’t altogether surprised to see that it’s Mac’s rental jeep. Figures. 

The person coming out of it does surprise him, though. 

“Is this bench taken?” Becky asks him. Politely as ever. 

He works up a half-chuckle and moves over. “You know, I figured I had a little time to kill. Did Mac say where to find me?”

“No. Actually, I- I kinda snuck out before he noticed. I wanted to find you before anybody else did.”

“Uh-huh. Then how did you know I was here?”

“Oh, it was nothing really. First time when my grandma was showing me around,” Becky says, waving at their surroundings. “I said to her ‘Is this the mad park?’ She thought it was just the funniest thing ever, but- if I was gonna be angry in Mission City, this is where I’d go to do it.”

“Smart pick, you want to watch those hunches. So now you’re here, what next?”

“Counterintuitively- mind if I tell you a story?”

His natural good cheer is starting to reassert itself. “Shoot.”

“Okay. There was this time that I asked Unc to stop cuddling me all the time.”

“What.”

Slowly. More a statement of incredulity than a question. 

“Oh, yeah. It was after the car crash- I mean, you know how affectionate Unc is, he hardly went to Phoenix at all for the first month. And normally I liked that, but sometimes I just needed to be alone, you know? To come to terms with everything. Because there were times when I just needed everything to stop, and be very quiet and think things out by myself, and that wasn’t gonna work when he was hugging me every five minutes. So, you know? I can tell them you’re going through the same kind of thing, if you like. Maybe that’ll help them understand.” 

“…you know, I appreciate that,” Jack says. “Yeah. Try telling them to lay off me, that might help.”

“I thought it might. Great.”

“I also appreciate your going to the trouble of making up a story just to try to cheer me up,” he can’t resist saying. 

Her blue eyes glimmer with amusement and frustration. “Aw, really? How’d you know?”

“Two things. One, Mac’s such a gentleman that you’d never need to ask him to stop.”

“Well, that doesn’t follow at all. Boundaries are psychologically important,” Becky says, dropping into a cadence very much like her mother’s tones. She has a tendency to do that whenever anything relating to Allison’s work enters the conversation. “But they don’t work if they’re unspoken. Good communication can make all the difference.”

“Two,” Jack says. “Come on! You’re Becky Grahme. You’ve got a worse addiction to hugs than I do to bacon.”

“Wanna bet? We could test it empirically.“

“You are so much like Mac sometimes- how? How do you test that?”

“How about whether you finish a bacon sandwich before I start hugging someone? By the way. Your breakfast’s in the car.”

“Oh, that’s not fair. It’s not like you brought your uncle along. This isn’t an even match.“

“Didn’t you tell me once, always make sure the odds are in your favour?” Becky asks, eyes twinkling. 

“You know, it’s a darned shame that your uncle is such the upstanding type. I bet with a year or two of practice, I could turn you into as good a hustler as ever snitched the hide off a mark.”

“Mom beat you to it,” Becky says loftily. “Training-wise, I mean. She always did say that the professions had a lot in common.”

“That so.”

“Which means, with a year or two of practice, I might be able to turn you into a halfway competent psychologist…”

************

Twenty minutes later, Jack’s feeling a certain fragile peace as they park the car and head back inside the house. Becky’s clearly inherited Mac’s predilection for distracting conversations: start at the point, end up somewhere in the vicinity of Saturn’s rings. Same kind of thing his Uncle Charlie specialises in, come to think of it. 

The peace lasts right up to Mac’s greeting. 

“Oh, hey Jack! Charlie and I were just talking about that heist he wants to do- would you believe he’s roped me in already?”

“What the hell? The minute my back’s turned, you two are suddenly - Mac, how does this always happen? Why is everything always, always about you?”

“Whoa now,” Charlie intervenes. “Look, you said you weren’t interested, and this thing’s hot. I’m on a time limit, and I’ve already spent longer up here than I planned.”

“But that’s my job!” Jack wails. “I’m the one who helps you with diddles, not- not goody two-shoes Mac!”

“It’s not like we mind you being along,” MacGyver says quickly. “I mean, we’re going to need a pilot to get to rural Arkansas. So that’s something you can do, just for starters.”

“Oh, do your own damned piloting! I’m going back to LA!”

This time he does slam the door. 

“…I just got him calmed down,” Becky says, allowing herself to slide down the wall until she reaches the floor. “Honestly.”

“But life-threatening situations always make me feel better,” her uncle says, looking awfully befuddled. “Get me busy enough, and I don’t have time to think about whatever’s worrying me.”

“Unc, I hate to disenchant you on this, but have you noticed you’re not exactly normal?”

“Are any of us?” Ruth asks, coming in with a plate of steaming hot buttered muffins. “Not a quality that runs in the family.”

“Probably you,” MacGyver says, just ahead of Charlie. 

“I dunno about that,” Becky says. “I mean, she did raise Jack. She’s probably a lot weirder than she lets on.”

Ruth doesn’t say anything to that, though she does beam. 

And lets Becky have first pick of the muffins. 


	5. Chapter 5

When he wakes up, the house is empty. 

Not just absent of people, but everything else: bare boards, cracked windows, and a layer of dust for carpet. Jack sneezes, as he brushes off his flight jacket; it fits around him a little more snugly than it ought to. A lot more snugly, actually- it takes a certain amount of effort for him to zip it up, and his hands feel wrong, too. Callused and cracked, like when he used to drive cars for sixteen hour stretches.

Three discrepancies, and he's only been awake two minutes. It wouldn't take an agent of Mac's caliber to figure something's up here. No footsteps around except his, though; he follows them to the door, checks outside cautiously for a waiting muzzle.

Nothing, though, except Mission City looking just as rundown as it ever did. This is definitely Ruth's house. There's the hole in the porch where Mike stuck her foot through it trying to prove a point, there's the spot where David spilled the bucket of whitewash that one time. So his memory's working fine there. He remembers coming back here last night, footsore after a long, exhausting walk across miles of the woods behind Parker Hill. 

"Could be just some practical joke, I guess," he says aloud. "Payback for that one time I hid all Mac's stuff..."

Though he can't imagine why Ruth would go along with this- and if so, where would they all be hiding? Mac's old home is the only place he can think of; shrugging, he sets off that way. Lucky thing it's not a long way. By the time the cafe comes in sight, he's puffing hard. (Okay, so he's not in the greatest shape, but anybody who regularly has to match MacGyver's hundred-metre dash can't afford to be too slow. Yesterday must have tired him out an awful lot.)

The cafe door leans open, with the lights on and an inviting smell of coffee coming out. Weird. A Phoenix agent's hardly going to be so hard up that he'd have to lease it out, but maybe it's sentiment or something. Or maybe-

"Made you the usual," Mac says, as he enters. 

Best guess he has right now is a spy school on the other side, or a prop town designed to throw him off his guard, make him share secrets. Jack takes a sip of the waiting drink and almost spits it all over the counter. 

"Root beer with three sugars. Right."

"Just the way you liked it in high school."

"Mac, that was twenty years ago!" Since which he's crisscrossed the world a few times, picked up a taste for coconut water and a couple of Beck's more exotic teas. And root beer not made with ladles of corn syrup. "I mean, I appreciate the effort, but you were right all along. This thing's noxious."

"That's not what you said yesterday." Mac says it rather slowly, with a twang that's hauntingly unfamiliar. "You thought it was all right then, pardner."

Now he gets it; sort of a slurred attempt at a Texan accent, which sounds very odd in that dry Midwestern voice. "You've been watching too many cowboy films again."

"As usual. So. Made up your mind yet?"

This would be a good time to ask what the hell's going on, Jack reflects. In this position, Mac surely would. Only he's not even sure this is his best friend, and for another thing, he's not Mac. Not knowing what's going on is situation normal for him; admitting he's up a creek without a clue wouldn't be. Some of his best hustles have come from walking into a crisis blind and taking advantage of a situation he can see with fresh eyes, while everyone else is preoccupied and panicking. "Made up my mind about what?"

"Whether we're doing this. Whether we're breaking into that mental hospital to save your uncle."

"Oh. Gee, I seem to have forgotten all about that."

"Jack, quit kidding around! You know I want to help out," Mac says, shoving a cloth around an empty glass; he's looking surprisingly comfortable behind that counter, Jack can't help noticing. Always did enjoy throwing himself into the part. (If badly, a lot of the time. Why Phoenix ever let their prize spy mess around with that Dexter cover identity, as silly and unconvincing as it was, he'll never know.) "Don't tell me you're still worrying about the morals of it."

"No." Whatever Charlie's done- assuming that it is actually his Uncle Charlie, and he's not having an exceptionally terrible trip or brainwashing session- whatever Charlie's done this time, there won't be any question about that. "As Beck would say, we're family."

"She's the only one I'm really worried about. If this all goes wrong somehow."

"Aw, come off it. We're professionals, it'll be a piece of cake."

"I guess you're right there," Mac says, laughing a little. "We've certainly had enough practice."

"Morning, Miss Eudora."

"Morning," the lady says. "Oh, Mr Dalton! Glad I've caught you. I know it's a little short notice, but could you possibly take me up to Pine City? I need some crafting supplies for the children's section at the library."

"By plane? It's only fifteen miles."

She laughs in a little old lady way, and slaps him on the back. "You are such a kidder. I mean in your cab."

"Would you believe me if I said I couldn't remember where I left it?"

"Parked out back again," Mac calls. "Like the last time you went on a bender and left it in a weird place. Sergeant Olson's too good to you, he really is."

"Cut you a deal," Jack says swiftly. "Catch me up on all the latest gossip on the way there, and you don't need to worry about tipping me."

He's hasn't seen a librarian look so thoroughly delighted since the last Phoenix charity drive. "I think I'll be getting the best of that bargain, young man."

******

She doesn't. A couple of dollars is more than worth two hours of extremely informative infodumping.  

Item: he's apparently never gotten around to leaving Mission City, though at least he has a plane. (Thank god.) Item: Mac hasn't either, and hates everything about his life except bubbly Becky. Item: Ruth's in Florida (that makes sense) but he's living in a trailer (that doesn't).

Item: he's clearly having a mental breakdown, some kinda fugue state or guilt or whatever about Nelson. The Phoenix psychologists would probably have a field day with this, but the answer seems pretty straightforward, actually: go along with the charade his subconscious has cooked up, do the heroic rescue thing with Mac, and he ought to bounce back to normal fast enough. Cut to relieved close-up on the patient and roll credits. 

"And why are you telling me all this?" Becky asks, thoroughly confused. 

"Cos I need help," Jack says, draining his hot chocolate. "On the off chance that I'm wrong and I've actually fallen through a black hole into some damned alternate universe, I need to know how not to screw up my life too much. From the sound of things, I'm going to need a high-speed primer if I don't want to end up on the breadline."

She looks troubled. "Thing is, Jack, I don't...I mean, maybe you've had too much to drink or something."

"You saying you don't believe me?"

"I'm saying you weren't like this yesterday," she says softly. "But I've got every faith in your coming back to me. Please, you know Unc and I need you."

Her voice is trembling; this isn't the confident and well-adjusted teenager he remembers. More fretful, even frightened. (Of course, it's a weird situation he's presented her, but then she takes Murdoc in stride...but then again, maybe this Becky's never seen anything worse than a little bullying at school.)

"I still don't understand why you aren't asking him," she adds. 

"I don't either," Jack says, blinking a little. Mac's hard, unfriendly laugh. The odd stray look of caged desperation, like nothing so much as the time he saw Pete Thornton snapping the cuffs shut on Murdoc; but no, he can't say any of that to doting Becky. "Guess I do worry about whether he'll respect me in the morning."

"If I could get him to respect himself, we might be getting somewhere," she mutters; and a few of Miss Eudora's more salacious comments suddenly snap into sharp relief. 

"Beck, am I- and he-"

"Oh, go on," she says, almost hopefully. "Say it. Please, it'd be so nice for somebody to just go ahead and tell the truth in this town for once."

"We're in love?"

"...I dunno if he'd go that far," Becky admits, deflating again. "I mean, I know you are."

Well. Interesting. 

Last week, he'd have been far more dubious; but Uncle Nelson's still fresh in his memory, and the man would have hated this so much. 

"Fine, fine. I can live with that."

Better than the rest of this, that's for sure...


	6. Chapter 6

“I was going to call it the Impeller,” Mac drawls, grimacing as he raises the beer bottle to his lips yet again.

Mission City’s barista evidently never picked up a taste for liquor, regardless of Becky’s hints about Tuesday night traditions. It’s a visible effort for Mac to choke the stuff down, and Jack’s not sure whether or not he finds that comforting. Sure, it’s exactly what he’d expect of his oldest friend. A reaction very nearly inimitable- gag reflexes are tricky to fake, he’s tried- but this whole situation has him more than spooked.

Being of no fixed abode doesn’t mean a thing, down in California. It’s warm, there’s always plenty of easy-come, easy-go money sloshing around the city of angels, and he’s got no end of tricks up his sleeve to pass the time between the not-so-respectable spy ventures. Old girlfriends who wouldn’t mind another pass, in exchange for a few secret smiles and one last trip to the clouds (piloting is a dream he’d indulge no matter what sacrifices he had to make for it, but it sure never hurt in the romance department). The infinite supply of tourists hunting out California joyrides- grunt work, but it’s there for the taking. And if his luck ever fizzled out completely, there’s always the comforting certainty of Mac’s place. An opportunity he tries not to abuse (much) (unless it seems like his best friend needs a little stirring up, cos Mac getting bored spells trouble. Like landing up in ‘Nam. Or joining the DXS. Or anything else that Mac will only admit was a poor life choice in retrospect)...but knowing he has a fallback has always made the difference between being broke and being desperate. And desperate hustlers don’t play their cards right.

“You listening?”

“Course I’m listening.” Just because Mac hasn’t said anything for the last ten minutes, doesn’t mean he’s not listening.

“Oh,” Mac says, and subsides back into the bottle again.

Whatever, Jack thinks. Whereas up here in Minnesota, he’s got an actual homestead, because apparently he needs one. And every little thing about the place, each feeble compromise between his lusts and needs and desires, and what’s actually here, is like so many burrs on skin. Just one would be fine, hardly noticeable; but in numbers, it’s maddening.

That grotty, half-finished paint job on the trailer’s exterior, as if he’d wandered off for a nap and forgotten where he left the bucket. All those cheap adolescent pin-ups, without a bit of variety and even less imagination. The state of the fridge, which shines with an alarming attention to hygiene (damn it, he got over that neurosis years back, or should have done) and an even more alarming lack of anything but the most basic supplies.

Of course, he’s lived in much worse places, renting and couch-surfing in LA; but those were other people’s places, not his. Those don’t count.

“I don’t think you’re listening,” Mac says again.

“You’re drunk,” Jack says dismissively; and longs for the version of this person who would damn well shut up when he didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.

Maybe he could rationalise the rest of this away, but seeing Mac a wreck like this is making his head swim. One of them has to be the responsible one, and at the moment it looks like that has to be him. And this northern cold’s getting right into his marrow. Somewhere around here there have to be extra blankets, but he doesn’t know where anything is in this place and won’t get a chance to look around until he’s alone.

Which is the last thing he wants, right now. “Why don’t we go up to the cafe, huh? It’d be a bit more cheerful.”

“I don’t want Becky to see me like this,” Mac returns. He finishes the bottle with one final, apparently unpleasant gulp; then, rather to Jack’s disappointment, immediately starts in on another.

“It’s eleven-thirty. She won’t see you, she’ll be asleep in her room.”

“Night-owl. You can never tell with her.”

“Okay. So she sees you’ve had a tipple. She already knows you do that-”

“There’s a difference between knowing and seeing,” Mac interrupts, which isn’t like him- “And besides, she’d see you. No. No way, it’s indecent.”

Jack contemplates pounding his head against the table, before deciding it’s too wobbly to stand up to that kind of punishment. The mixed signals have been screwing with him all night; there’s the casual way that Mac invited himself over, but then, tense body language that’s kept them from so much as touching all evening. A movie, a dignified black and white Western that’s so manly it’s tipped right over into homoerotic- is he meant to read it as camp, or isn’t he? And as for the drinking, well, that could mean anything.

(Hell, his Mac- the one who he’s pretty sure is heterosexual, if only because he fell for Nikki Carpenter years back and just plain hasn’t noticed yet- would worry a lot less about being mistaken for gay.)

(Or is he the panicky one here, and Mac’s only respecting his feelings? Christ, that’s even worse.)

“C’mon. It’d be cosier than here, that’s for sure.”

Mac simply shakes his head, and topples across the sofa with disgusting indifference, spit leaking from his mouth onto the faded blue corduroy. It takes a lot of effort to make those gentle features and tousled hair look unattractive, but he’s certainly tried his hardest.

_Maybe he wants me to push him away; or wants to tell himself that he tried._

Well, there’s swinging both ways and then there’s being with a partner who has some damned self-respect for himself; and if they’re gonna do this, Jack privately vows, they’re gonna have a good time. Which means getting somewhere more nicer than this falling-down dump.

First things first, then.

He nudges the gas heater off, unobtrusively, which isn’t too difficult (the thing seems to be held together with duct tape and hope, and as much trust as he has in Mac’s improvisations, they’re not meant to be long-term solutions.) Step two is to beg off, on the grounds of running out to fetch a tasty midnight snack- with any luck, after twenty minutes of being cold, lonely and drunk, Mac’ll be more amenable to the suggestion of a ride home.

Step two almost immediately runs into trouble, because his partner’s not having any of it.

“You stay put,” MacGyver says, with a fierce, sullen anger completely at odds with his previous ambivalence. “It’s Tuesday night, for fuck’s sake, you’re not going anywhere.”

If he thought Mac was swearing just to try and shock him, he wouldn’t care. It’s the carelessness with which it’s said that worries him, as though that’s just status quo for them….for a moment he toys with the idea of raising the stakes. Some rough horseplay, half-unfriendly fighting, might give him the opportunity to just drag the guy outside bodily, but he discards the notion immediately. Anything that violent might get too real for his tastes- and if it came to it, Mac always could best him in a fight.

Or his Mac could, anyway…

“Tell you the truth,” Jack says. “I don’t want to be here tonight, the place is scaring me stiff. I think it’s haunted.”

And at last, at long last, after a day of watching oversugared schmaltz barely covering for a fearful rage, one flash of his best friend at last; Mac has to sit up a bit, pull himself together again before he manages to quit laughing. “Jack, come off it! There’s no such thing as ghosts!”

“Maybe I’m being haunted by someone that isn’t dead yet, I dunno! All I know is, it keeps hanging around the place, and making weird noises, and frankly I’d rather sleep in the duck pond than my own bed right now. This trailer's freaking me out.”

“You are such an idiot,” Mac says contemptuously. Contemptuously, but with a ragged note of charm. “You’re going stir-crazy from being stuck in Mission City too long, that’s all, you need a break.”

Uh-huh. Probably a fair diagnostic/solution for what’s wrong with Mac, if not actually all that relevant for his own woes. “Okay, fine. Fine. Why don’t we head out to a motel for the night, somewhere cheap and cheerful where we can actually relax?”

He wouldn’t have thought this night could get much more uncomfortable, but the worriment on Mac’s face is too familiar. Far too mundane. A warning for anybody of his ilk to move on, that look; there’s no traction in selling dreams and flights and get-rich-quick schemes to anybody who can’t contemplate a few dollars of outlay without bothering over the mental arithmetic.

(Well, there is; but it takes a better liar.)

“I’ll pay,” Jack promises.

And suddenly that’s enough, as he knew it would be. Mac troops out to the car under his own steam, eased and tractable as a child at the prospect of a trip to somewhere else, anywhere at all. No more anger, no more silence; suddenly he’s bubbling over with soft comments and hungry questions, throwing the same attention into the prospect of one brief night on the road that he ought to be devoting to- ooh. Making sure the world doesn’t blow up, or something.

Jack coaxes the car into gear, and wonders how long he can keep Mac in this upbeat mood.

(Wonders too, how many times he’s thought that before.)


End file.
